reviews

About Rotonda (Kocher-Belorukov-Badrutt):

„Rotonda (INTONEMA int016) is a single 47-minute improvisation performed by the trio of Gaudenz Badrutt, Ilia Belorukov, and Jonas Kocher. It’s one of these lengthy, slow and quiet affairs, which I usually liken to Quaker prayer meetings, because a player will apparently only make a sound when he has something to say. Otherwise, Aut tace aut loquere meliora silentio1 is their motto.

Kocher’s inaudible accordion-playing has crossed our path before, and I often find it surprising how memorable his work is when, pound for pound, there’s so little of it. Matter of fact he joined forces with Badrutt on the album Strategy Of Behaviour In Unexpected Situations for the Insubordinations label in 2015, and the agonising tension induced by that music is something I won’t forget in a hurry. I needed prescription muscle relaxants for about two weeks.

Badrutt is still doing unspeakable things with electricity, and given the dark nature of his crimes we expect to read about his arrest in Zurich any day now. He turned his back on his beginnings as a classical pianist, doing so in a memorable public action that involved the conflagration of a concert grand that had been doused in petrol, and for 15 years he has been in pursuit of the sort of dreams that only sine waves can give a man. Notably, he’s done it with the woodwind player Hans Koch, and he plays in strøm with Christian Müller and Kocher. Here, he does some form of live sampling, which may involve taking the temperature of the room with his magic thermometer (don’t ask!) and working with “acoustic sound sources”, which given the environment in question may involve anything from riffling through a card index to agitating a wooden library shelf.

Yes, they did it in the Rotonda of the Mayakovsky Library in Saint-Petersburg, starting imperceptibly at first, but building up to an alarming combination of tones that drove all the readers out into the street in short order, while a small federation of librarians laboured to maintain an aura of calm. Belorukov is almost elbowed aside by the taut fabric of fear created by the Swiss pair, but he manages to insert some pained, abstract tones from his alto saxophone, comforting it like a wounded animal. I’d also add that their playing is highly attuned to the space itself; Kocher in particular seems to be in his element, exploiting the natural echo of the venue, and his short utterances (when they do happen) delineate the architecture of the walls and ceiling with a pinpoint accuracy.

Bleak, cold, slow to the point of inertia, and full of unexpected silences, this is still an impressive bout of minimal blap, packed with existential doubts and strange emotions.“ Written 2015 by Ed Pinsent, the sound projector

„[…] On these six tracks, strøm are capable of creating a deliciously fractured and bitty approach to electronic noise, refusing any form of lushness or pleasant surface to the sounds, and accepting only the choicest moments of compressed digital glitch and crackle into the mix. Austerity and severity are just two of the watchwords hopefully sellotaped onto their respective consoles or mixing desks. This can result in very exciting music, where the listener’s fleshy brain and listening apparatus are draped over a stainless steel structure of some sort; there’s that much power and inflexible strength to the core. Elsewhere, there is a menacing bass drone underpinning the work which may have originated from the clarinet. Oddly enough these moments are less satisfying for some reason, and I find I derive more satisfaction from the pieces which spit out their digital juices like so much hot fat over the roasting pan. Extremely abstract music, as reflected in the plain colourfield designs of the cover artworks. But this is very far from the clean lines of Raster-Noton or other minimal-glitch work of Cologne and Vienna, and its lineage does not come from techno beats or the dancefloor.“ Written 2016 by Ed Pinsent, the sound projector

About Strategy of behaviour in unexpected situations (Badrutt-Kocher):

„This delightfully titled album from the Swiss duo of Kocher (accordion) and Badrutt (electronics) is available as a CD, or as a free to download file from the label. It is not then necessary to pay for this music, but I thoroughly recommend that you do. A single track, recorded (I think) in a live concert setting in Berlin during October 2011, this is a fine example of improvised music that lives and breathes tension. Kocher’s accordion work has impressed me a lot over the last year or two. His attention seems to be on the quality and diversity of sounds he can pull from his seemingly non-versatile instrument rather than slip into the tendency for drones that the accordion used in experimental settings often leans toward. Badrutt’s electronics are of the minimal kind- a combination of sine-like tones, small clicks and bits of fizzing distortion. Its something of a cliché to say that it gets hard to tell the two musician’s contributions apart, but often here this is the case. The music they make arrives out of silence. There are a lot of quiet passages acroos the thirty-two minutes here, either those of complete inactivity or often just thin tones from one or the other musician, but when the music does erupt, as it does often in tiny bunches of sound, it does so in a jarring, spiteful manner. Think the lowercase clicks and buzzes of the turn of the millennium improv scene, but instead of polite little sounds submerged in long silences, when the calm is broken here it is done so in a quite vicious, aggressively cutting way. The temptation is to relax into quiet music, but Strategy of behaviour in unexpected situations exists in a constant state of expectancy- will the next sound be a quiet, calm one or a brittle, edgy one? The tension in this music is such that listening carefully leaves you jumpy and unsettled.
Not much more to say about this one then. beyond that this is music right up my street. What is clear to me here is the attention the two musicians are paying not only to one another but to how they build their music as a whole, and that attention, and the effort and strain taken in undertaking it is palpable here. This improvisation that lives and breathes each time you press play, but doesn’t do so through adrenalin rushes or dense layers of activity, rather relying on the naked qualities of brief, simple, yet affecting sounds placed neatly in opposition to one another. Well worth a purchase.“Richard Pinell / the watchfulear.

„The 32-minute eponymous piece that comprises this CD by Jonas Kocher and Gaudenz Badrutt takes place on a bed of silence. In fact, one could call silence the third member of the group. Yet this silence is not empty; it is potent and simmering, with a life of its own.
In many ways this piece is about listening, about patience and expectation as you wait for sounds to arise. And sounds do arise, in all shapes and sizes: whooshes, clicks, beeping, crunching, dark drones, high-pitched squeals, and subliminal vapors that pass through like shadows. The word « unexpected » in the title is also quite telling: sometimes the sounds sneak up quietly, and other times they explode the silence into shards. Kocher and Badrutt like to play with the unforeseen; they enjoy sounds that startle and astonish, as well as the space that’s left when these sounds fade off into nothing.
The modern world is filled with noises, most of which we hardly acknowledge, but a piece of music such as this provides the space to actually hear sounds as they emerge. This is true even when the sound is a high-pitched drone or repetitive beeping; such sounds are reminiscent of the French phrase jolie laide, which literally means « pretty-ugly »: even if these sounds might seem displeasing on their own, they are exactly right in the context of the whole. Altogether this is a gripping piece of ambient music and electroacoustic innovation that’s a pleasure to explore“Florence Wetzel / all about jazz

„A thirty-three minute of carefully placed sounds and well chosen silence, I’d say. This is one of those works were you hear something, short, and then nothing, a bit longer. Action and interaction music. Its not always easy to say who starts the action, but perhaps they alternate between each other, and perhaps they both start every now and then, while at other times they both stop. But on a few occasions they collide mid air and when they bump they go on collision course which actually may take some time. This only happens maybe three of four times here. It’s here that they sustain their sounds for a while and deliver more tension to the music, even more than to the other parts. It’s full on, intense listening and playing going on that requires your full attention. You can’t play this while doing something else (I tried and failed). Stay focussed. The musicians, so why shouldn’t you?“Frans de Waard / Vital weekly

„Two new releases by Jonas Kocher’s Flexion label, and those releases can be had for the exchange of money, other CDs, books, bottle of wine, postcards etc. The first of these is not by Kocher himself but by two friends, the duo of one Hans Koch on bass clarinet and Gaudenz Badrutt on electronics – whatever that may consist of these days (laptop, stomp boxes, synths, electrical connections) cooking up some radical improvised music. Not radical in the sense of things being very loud or very soft, but in the sense of approaches to the bass clarinet and the use of electronics. It sounds all very improvised, with many short sounds of all kind on both of these instruments, sometimes even dropping below the threshold of hearing, and sometimes all of a sudden they make long form, sustaining gestures of gliding scales. Crackles, drones, perhaps a synth of some kind, it makes up a fascinating ride for the entire fifty-four minutes in twelve tracks, ranging somewhere from mere thirty-six seconds to just over ten minutes. Best enjoyed, I thought, when played as one piece, rather than a selection of twelve pieces. Koch/Badrutt don’t play easy pieces of music, far from actually, and intense listening is required, but once you get deeper into this some true beauty unfolds. Strangely wonderful difficult music.“ Frans de Waard / Vital Weekly

Jonas Kocher just released on his microlabel Flexion the debut album by a duo consisting of Hans Koch (bass clarinet) and Gaudenz Badrutt (electronics) – they both play with Kocher on the above-mentioned is one long improvisation segmented on the disc in indexes of varying lengths. We’re still in the microsound world – sparseness, extended techniques, the impression of stepping inside the sound, collective playing always on the verge of breaking up, silence threatening to swallow non-silence.“ François Couture / Monsieur Délire